A quick Sunday treat for you: in anticipation of their gig here in Brighton on Tuesday I’ve been watching (and re-watching) the video for That Fucking Tank’s ‘Mr. Blood’, a song from an album I reviewed and liked a great deal. That was about a year and a half ago now and was written a month or so after I saw the band for the first time.
The video is pretty cool and fits the tone of the song really well in my view. Enjoy! It’s embedded below but you may want to click through for an embiggened version, yes?
Late last year, whilst meandering through the day’s crop of Tumblr posts, I came across the “Fuck Hardcore Shows Manifesto”. The original post and blog appear to have been taken down, possibly due to the amount of attention, number of comments (many aggressively negative) and reposts it received. Fortunately the nature of Tumblr is such that once something is out there, it tends to stay out there. Here’s a copy of the original post in full:
it’s one of those things where you avoid something you take issue with for a while, and then suddenly find yourself in the middle of it, and it catches you off guard, ill-prepared, and you start fuming.
i went to see envy at reggie’s last night (amazing, by the way!). one of the opening bands was trash talk. it was funny, because the first two bands were some instrumental band from belfast and touche amore, and although kids were going nuts and singing along, it was no big deal. then trash talk came out. immediately, a huge pit formed in front of the stage, squishing almost everyone else back against the back wall. and then the familiar scene began.
pacing back and forth, posturing aggressively, stomping, kicking, punching, violently flailing arms. two dudes accidentally knocked into each other and started posturing at each other and shit talking, needing to be separated before a fight. kids crisscrossed the room, performing one of the most extreme versions of macho masculinity ever to dilute the political bases of punk rock. because this violence isn’t even raw and reactionary; it’s planned, staged, practiced. it privileges machismo unquestioningly. it privileges the antiquated notion that dudes can’t control themselves and need to blow off steam violently because men will be men. it’s such an obvious fucking farce. » Read the rest of this entry «
Just a quick review for you today, of Midwest indie/emo rockers Football, Etc. The Away Game 7″ came out last September and has recently made its way to me. For context, think back to latter-day emo – after the initial wave of frenetic, chaotic outfits, around the time in the mid-90s when the mellower end of emo and the more delicate strands of US indie-rock began to hybridise. That’s the territory that Football, Etc. are working in, the trail blazed by Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Modest Mouse in their more straightforward moments.
Side A gives us the titular ‘Away Game’, three and a half minutes of slow, steady and despondent vocals, ever so slightly at odds with the mid-pace power chords, palm mutes and picking, if only because of the spritely and warm mid-heavy sound of the guitar. Towards the song’s close the rhythm builds ever-so-slightly, as do the power of the vocals, but that careful pace isn’t upset.
The frontman of Yngve & the Innocent, the eponymous Yngve, has been performing and recording music for over half a decade, but it was in 2008 that he permanently upped sticks and moved to London from Dublin/county Sligo, with his new band forming soon after. The alt-folk four-piece have been gigging the UK and Ireland pretty relentlessly since then, honing themselves as a live band through tours, regular slots and even a few residencies.
Nothing Was Delivered is the band’s first EP, and it’s a labour of love that highlights their easy musical competence. Opening with the chipper ‘You’ve Been Released’, the fusion of classic 50s Americana with a more modern pop attitude and sound is evident: upbeat good-time piano mixes with bluesy guitar riffs, all with a tugging thread of swing to the rhythm and a charmingly chirpy tone to the vocals. ‘You’ve Been Released’ ploughs a similar furrow if a little cheekier and boasting some snappy chorus vocal lines, with the lyrics addressing the time-worn but still resonant theme of making your own mistakes and being who you want to be.
Boston three-piece The Cold Beat‘s debut album, Get Safe, lays many of its cards down from the outset. The title may be a little unfortunate: there’s nothing on offer here that’s likely to have your jaw dropping, your eyes popping or any other such cliche. The opening tune, ‘Play to Win’, establishes a formula that recurs throughout the record. Certainly on the occasions when I put Get Safe on in the background whilst working, it dropped into background texture. Safe, indeed.
But that’s unnecessarily harsh; the title presumably refers to a thematic thread of the album (I unfortunately can’t comment, as I’ve been unable to find lyrics online and lack the patience to transcribe). And the formula that opener ‘Play to Win’ establishes is a compelling, more-ish blend of stomping rhythms and mildly anthemic (oxymoronic, sure, but work with me here) songwriting. Even when this album has faded into the background that’s not stopped my head from nodding or my feet from moving or some other such cliche.
It’s a good record, is what I’m saying, and I’ve enjoyed listening to it every time I have. It’s a stylish, well-constructed piece of work, effortlessly catchy with impressive regularity, and has a fullness in its sound that you’d be forgiven for thinking came from a larger line-up.
Boston’s The Saddest Landscape are a band with a bit of a pedigree; originally formed in 2002, they released splits with notable outfits like Funeral Diner and shared the stage with a number of contemporary emo and screamo outfits. They split for a couple of years in ’06 and ’07 before reuniting for a few European shows. As is often the way this brief reunion turned into some more shows, a split and a discog vinyl LP – and, now, a new full-length release.
One thing about this band that leaps right out at me is that although, given the vocal passion and volume/intensity of the music, it is easy to categorise them as a screamo band, their songs are much simpler and less ornamented than a lot of current screamo bands, who often pride technical virtuosity and musicianship very highly – possibly because that’s the natural place to push frantic playing that only ever seems chaotic and unplanned. In the case of the Saddest Landscape, the music is simpler, constructed out of more basic components in building towards an emotionally intense and violently passionate whole. Whether this is deliberate or not I don’t know, but it’s an approach which meets with mixed success.
“The social media which is championed by those revolving door apparatchiks moving between the State Department and silicon valley (eg) is not organisation itself, but merely a means to it and, as it turns out, a dispensable means.”
So quickly forgotten by well-intentioned, excitable futurists!
Even among friends I’ve heard more excitable talk about Google’s (admirable if potentially misguided) efforts to allow Egyptians to tweet than about, say, the extremely impressive grassroots organisation on display in Egypt.
Perhaps it is simply that for many Western people it is easier to relate to the use of social media than it is to relate to those reacting with passion, courage and dedication to a corrupt and authoritarian government.
